The Mystery of To Kill a Mockingbird

Its being the 50^th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, teachers all over the country, nay, the world, will be assigning this classic piece of literature to their classes. And, no doubt, cities around the country, in one of those gimmicks to get the slackers to read, will probably hold “To Kill A Mockingbird Days.”

So look for even more honors for its 82-year-old author, Harper Lee, the creator of the Finches — Atticus, Scout and Jem, not to mention the Underwood typist behind such immortal characters as Arthur “Boo” Radley, neighbor Dill Harris, accused rapist Tom Robinson and a host of other Southern archetypes vividly brought to life in this much-loved novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, named “Novel of the Century” in a 1999 poll taken by Library Journal, and re-printed an astounding 40 million times, spending 80 weeks on the Best-Sellers List.

The book is not without controversy, however. The book entered the American lexicon at a very agitated time. I know this sounds silly in our enlightened age, but back then white people were actually frightened and angry about blacks’ and other minorities’ gaining political power and, get this, it was so antediluvian that some reactionary politicians thought about formulating a strategy to make political hay out of these resentments. Heck, some governors wanted to celebrate Confederate History without their mentioning slavery and angry folks carried firearms into town-hall meetings, declaring the 14th amendment to the Constitution unconstitutional. It was surely a different world back then; our American society has advanced so much, it’s hard for us to relate now to that primitive time.

But there’s another controversy about To Kill A Mockingbird which doesn’t get much press but still lingers to this day, namely: Who wrote the book? Are we sure it was Nelle Harper Lee? (And yes, Nelle is the correct spelling, according to her unauthorized biographer Charles J. Shields. Or as he quotes Ms. Lee secondhand, “It’s Ellen spelled backwards.”)

I raise this heretical question of Mockingbird’s true authorship because of an experience I had more than two decades ago in Branchville, South Carolina.

First, a little back story.

For two years in the early 1980s, I worked with a woman named Marie Rudisill an antique dealer from Branchville, helping her sort out and put into words her memories of the childhood and adult life she spent with one Truman Strekfus Persons Capote. She was Truman’s cousin (I think that was the relationship, the bloodlines get a little confusing, not to mention close) and Marie “Tiny” Rudisill lived with Truman, along with his other cousins, Jennie, Callie, Bud and Sook, in a large rambling home in Monroeville, Alabama, where Truman, from ages six to nine, was dumped by his parents, who Marie said, were quite fond of the high life. (Sook, who passed away years earlier, is the inspiration for the kitchen-guide in Truman’s wonderful short story, “A Christmas Memory.”)

I had met Marie years earlier when I was the editor of the magazine Writer’s Digest. One day Marie contacted our offices in Cincinnati, asking if we were interested in her memoir about growing up with Truman.

Duh. We were ever! So, in the spring of 1974, we published Marie’s evocative memoir. On the cover I put a laddie-picture of Truman in white shorts with the caption “Marie Rudisill’s nephew.” That was all. No mention of Truman. (Boy, did the publisher, Richard Rosenthal, hate that. “I was going for understatement,” I said in my defense. “You ended up with no statement!” he said in response.)

Even without the hypy cover lines, though, the magazine’s cover and Marie’s story earned a mention in Newsweek, although the snarky editors there couldn’t resist including the embarrassing fact that we paid a measly $300 for the memoir, troubling, considering I was trying to turn Writer’s Digest into a publication where writers could bitch about low freelance fees.

I called Marie’s story “Other Voices, The Same Rooms,” a play on the title of Truman’s remarkable book, "Other Voices, Other Rooms," about growing up in the South. And the memoir was filled with some very good prose: “The sidewalks [of Monroeville, Alabama] were paved but the streets were dirt, Alabama clay, which produced red mushy mire with the winter rains and a mass of restless dust in the hot summer,” for example. “Restless dust,” a nice touch, There were other surprising aspects of the memoir, and some a little freaky. “Surrounding the landscape, a tall fence made of animal bones drew our boundary line. Jennie had them hauled from an animal graveyard near Claiborne and had supervised the selection and laying of each bone. ‘No,’ she would say, ‘the backbone can’t be next to the foot, that ain’t right.’” A yard full of human bones? This was Southern naturalism at either its best or its nadir. In any case, it was a pleasure to publish it.

Not that this was Capote-strength prose, mind you. Few writers, for my money, have ever approached Truman’s early work. One of my favorite short stories is “The Grass Harp,” a character study of a young boy sent to live with relatives after his mother’s death, a situation that puts one in the mind of Truman’s own experience — to butcher a Southern expression. In this story, the owner of the house, Verena, a hard-nosed businesswoman (she owns everything in town and is held in low esteem by everyone who owes her money), lives with her withdrawn, child-like sister Dolly. (Playing the part of Sook? A character so tenderly and deftly drawn had to come from somewhere.)

Hell, let Truman tell it: “[After my mother’s death], that afternoon Dolly’s friend, Catherine Creek, came over [to the house] and packed my clothes and Papa drove me to the impressive shadowy house on Talbo Lane. As I was getting out of the car, he tried to hug me but I was scared of him and wriggled out of his arms. I’m sorry now that we did not hug each other. Because a few days later, on his way up to Mobile his car skidded and fell fifty feet into the Gulf. When I saw him again, there were silver dollars weighting down his eyes.”

In this great tale, Dolly invents a “dropsy medicine” with the help of Catherine (who could be Indian but no one is quite sure), and Verena along with a doctor from Chicago try to wrest the formula from Dolly, who will have none of this crass mercantilism. Together the boy, Dolly and Catherine escape the hard-nosed Verena and they run away to live in a China tree. OK, it’s a tree house but… The title comes from one of Truman’s great metaphors: “Below the hill grows a field of high Indian grass that changes color with the seasons: go to see it in the fall, late September, when it has gone red as sunset, when scarlet shadows, like firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves, sighing human music, a harp of voices.”

One cannot begin a Capote story without plunging onward toward the end, his captivating style and his memorable phrasing tugging the reader along dusty streets into big empty mansions and up into China trees.

Critics like Alfred Kazin weren’t all that impressed with Truman’s later works like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” but you will search high and low to find anyone dissing Early Capote. He is smack dab in the middle of great Southern Lit, true descendant of Mississippi’s Faulkner and Catawba’s Thomas Wolfe, a contemporary of Shelby Foote, Erskine Caldwell and Fannie Flagg and younger brother to New York Times’ crossword puzzle fave Zora Neale Hurston. That amalgamation of human interaction with nature that obtains in all of our best regional Southern literature came alive in Truman’s young hands (he wrote “Other Voices” at the tender age of 24).

So, yes, I’m a fan.

So, needless to say, when Marie asked me to help her with her memoirs of Truman’s life in Alabama, I was thrilled to play even this small part.

As it turns out, Marie had the scoop on all of the family’s unusual goings-on; events that I was privy to while helping her collect her thoughts for her pending autobiography. And she wasn’t shy about sharing what she knew.

Her stories about Truman, his idiosyncrasies (for example, he hated cut glass), his childhood prodigy-ness (he always had a photographic memory, Marie recalled, although I think the correct term is eidetic), his loves and his friendships made for amazing copy, copy that, eventually, got so juicy that I was sure the best parts would be excised by William Morrow & Co., the book’s publisher. (In any case, I was replaced on the project after a year, furtively and unexplainably.)

Truth be told, I don’t think Morrow had any clue as to what Marie was going to reveal in her book. They probably should have. I think the publisher was envisioning some sort of sweet nostalgic look back at the great author’s life. But if you think Marie was interested in sweet nostalgia, well, you didn’t know her.

One of the bombs she dropped while we were working together concerned Truman’s next door neighbor in Monroeville, Nelle Harper Lee. Nelle and Truman were BFFs all their lives. In my mind I pictured the two of them on hot muggy Alabama summer days, swinging on a tire hanging from a mossy tree. (The truth was probably a lot more prosaic but I do love me my Southern writers and all their clichés.)

Marie swore up and down until the day she died that Truman wrote Mockingbird as a gift to Nelle. As evidence she brought forth the fact that Lee never wrote another thing in her life after Truman left her for the thrills of the Big Apple. (Lee’s work with Truman, researching In Cold Blood, didn’t count, apparently.) And in Charles Shields' biography, he notes that Truman and Nelle "Ha-puh" Lee often wrote stories together on an old Underwood typewriter.

But sometimes Marie could confuse real life with stories from Truman’s books. She once told me that Truman’s father was an itinerant con man who would travel around the South with an Egyptian man scamming the local populace by “burying” the Egyptian and having people bet on whether or not the guy would survive. I’m told that these characters are featured in one of Truman’s short stories. Was it based on real life? Who could tell? I was merely typing as fast as I could. So whether or not Truman wrote To Kill A Mockingbird is either an elaborate story Marie concocted or whether it contains a kernel of truth is unknown. Maybe he critiqued her chapters, maybe he added details, or maybe he had absolutely nothing to do with it. With Marie’s death more than a decade ago, there is no way to check back with her.

Eventually Marie’s book came out and all that was left of my part in it was the first chapter that, word for word, was printed as I wrote it. Many friends urged me to take action but I never liked lawyers and by the time the critics got through trashing the book, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be identified with it, anyway. “Mean-spirited score-settling” was the way the book was described in USA Today.

So the question begs an answer: Did Truman write To Kill a Mockingbird? Or did just growing up around Truman make Nelle a gifted authoress? (Marie’s memoir contained some beautiful phrases; maybe it’s a Southern osmosis-thing, something in the water.)

I suspect that once you have written a classic book like To Kill a Mockingbird, the temptation is to avoid a sophomore jinx, one theory behind J.D. Salinger’s reluctance to put his work before the public again after his stunning first successes. Witnessing how the critics devoured Truman after the bombshell status of In Cold Blood — lesser lights shining rudely on his reputation, cowards sniping at him from safe perches, wielding viciously poisonous pens — maybe Nelle decided that her heart wasn’t in a life of letters.

Or, and wouldn’t this be wonderful? perhaps if and when Nelle passes, we’ll find trunks full of manuscripts, hidden away from public view. Like Emily Dickinson! Except this time, the story moves south from New England, back to a rural Alabama where “in rainy weather, the streets turned to red slop and the courthouse sagged in the square, where ladies bathed before noon and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.” (Lee). Or the South “where when leaving town you take the church road and pass a glaring hill of bone white slabs and brown burnt flowers.” (Capote.)

In any case, I’m not going to challenge Nelle Harper Lee. For as Capote noted in Shields' biography of her, she was a “sawed-off tomboy with an all-hell-let-loose wrestling technique.” And even at 82, I think she could take me.